Charlie Chaplin celebrates at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse
Here’s a great way to start 2022, with lots of laughs, loads of emotion… and a few tears too. The Cinémathèque de Toulouse indeed offers a Chaplin cycle, from the first short films to the mythical films that are “The Dictator” or “The Kid”, and those, speaking, in their time despised that must be seen again “Mr. Verdoux” and “The Countess of Hong-Kong”. It all began in Venice, California, in 1914. As a film crew filmed a run-of-the-mill soapbox race, a crowd gathered on the sides of the road appeared in the frame of a strange fellow with strange behavior. Wearing a frock coat and bowler hat, trousers that were too wide, a small mustache and a thin cane, the importunate was insistent. We push him out of the field, he comes back. On the repress, it becomes encrusted. This is the first appearance of Charlot. And he will forever mark the cinema with his silhouette.
From poverty to fame
Forty years later, in “A King in New York”, then banished from the United States by the witch hunts embodied by Senator McCarthy, in what sounds like an autobiographical parable, Chaplinra a fallen king, in exile, filmed in his knowledge by the hidden camera of a television to which he refuses to lend himself. This will be Chaplin’s last appearance (if we except his cameo in “The Countess of Hong Kong”).
Between these two films, from Charlot to Chaplin, the native of London who experienced great poverty during his childhood, will have diverted the camera to give a soul to the cinema. And the camera, in return, will have bewitched her to sell her soul to the cinema.